Humanities: May 2005 Archive Page

Often, when studying history, the details are lost in an attempt to fully understand the bigger picture. We do not look at what the individuals faced, the decisions they had to make. This project will not only examine the Holocaust as a whole event, but delve deeper into the history to see what choices people had to make as the Nazis stormed their homes, took them to ghettos, and forced them to dig their own graves.

It will be important to approach this subject with caution and seriousness. It was a horrible experience that we can never recreate or even relate to. As you create your story, pay close attention to the details. Read the stories of those who lived and were able to share with world what they experienced. This project will hopefully draw you into the time period and help you understand it more thoroughly. --[Holocaust Choose-Your-Own Adventure Assignment] (Stories of the Holocaust Wiki Project )

Part of a project that asked students to create a branching narrative (of the Choose Your Own Adventure model) describing the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

On the one hand, this is an excellent way to get students to imagine all the possibilities, rather than simply following the story of one particular family. I particularly like the concept of an Intersection Point, where it seems events take on a more communal focus.

On the other hand, it would take a strong teacher (and supportive administration) to manage something like this.

Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and I'm currently involved in doing some editing and design work for them. I don't have any particular knowledge of the subject matter, but I can tell that emotions run high on topics such as simulations (in which students act out the roles of prisoners or guards) and the over-emphasis on rescues (when in fact few people were willing to risk themselves for their Jewish fellow citizens).

Via Weblogg-ed.

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.

Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today'sstudents have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) --Margaret Talbog --Best in Class (New Yorker)

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

There was one kid who always sat in the front row--let's call him Fester--who recognized me right from the start of class because he'd read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. --Mike Arnzen --Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name... "Fester". His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word "climax." She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her -- not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don't teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall's American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom's Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn't bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I'd have let him redo the presentation if he'd have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing -- academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don't want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it's a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student's grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It's part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I've had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

As these groups lose their remaining original members, others are on stages around the country are using their names, Porter said. Some groups claim an association with the originals, while others say they own the rights to use their titles.

"Imposters bask in reflected glory. None contributed to the respected legacies that they claim to represent and the billing should reflect accordingly," she said, adding that it is a matter of what is advertised versus "what am I getting? The public doesn't know that and they capitalize on it."

Groups that perform without saying "tribute," according to Sonny Turner, an original member of The Platters, are "unequivocally misleading ... (It's) like buying a knock-off Rolex watch." --Amanda Cochran --'Truth in Music' stalls in committee (Tribune-Review)

A high school friend of mine is the drummer for an 80s and 90s cover band called Gonzo's Nose. I've never heard them play, but I do read their website from time to time. It pokes fun at the fact they have been "playing other people's music since 1996".

As I understand it, the music industry lets other performers pay a standard fee if they want to "cover" somebody else's work. I seem to remember a Gonzo's Nose anecodote about band members encountering groupies who don't know what a "cover band" is.
While those fellows are based in the Washington, D.C. area, I wonder how the proposed Pennsylvania legislation would have affected them, if at all.

Researchers and educators blame the gap between books and boys on everything from a built-in fidgetiness to low expectations to a lifelong association of reading with their mothers, teachers, librarians -- all female role models.

But now more are suggesting that the problem may not lie entirely within the boys themselves. Some educators believe that the way schools teach reading tends to favor girls, both in terms of teaching style and reading materials chosen. It's a concern that has pushed teachers to work harder to both find materials that boys like to read, and to find more "boy-friendly" ways to present that material.

"Boys have a more tactile, 'hands-on' learning style," and they favor subject matter which reflects that, says Linda Milliken, reading specialist at Chester County Intermediate Unit near Philadelphia. "They like lots of nature topics -- bugs, dinosaurs, how things work," she explains. "They like to identify with a character who has his life in control."

What they may not like is the problem-focused reading popular with many teachers today -- stories about divorce, abuse, single-parenthood, addiction, and such.

Girl readers are generally drawn to narratives that focus on relationships between people, while boys tend to prefer adventure, science fiction, war stories, history, and, of course, sports. --Mary Beth McCauley --How to Get Boys to Sit Down with a Book (ABC News)

My son (age seven) recently selected a series of books on the elements (Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen... we even tracked down Magnesium) for me to read to him at bedtime. We're working our way through another series of books on Energy of the Future (we finished Biofuel of the Future the other day, and we're on Solar Power of the Future now.

The men in my American Lit course generally liked The Great Gatsby and James McBride's Miracle at St. Anna, though one student who has called herself a literary snob spoke out against both works. But some of the female students who didn't get into the heavier literary works also liked McBride, so clearly gender is only one factor in a complex equation.

As for gender differences in literary styles, see this great spoof of a tandem writing assignment, an e-mail that has been passed around for years.

Something important is happening in the world of journalism:. It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. The shift stems from the collision of technology with media.

This evolution is having an effect on all three major constituencies of journalism. The most important of those is what I call the former audience -- the people who until recently were our readers, listeners and viewers, who until recently were either buying our lectures or not. --Dan Gillmor --What Professional and Citizen Journalists Can Learn From Each Other (Bayosphere)

Random things that I will not miss about high school:

- listening to my classmates whine
- my business law teacher parroting back everything I say in the form of a question
- never getting any input on anything I turn in
- disgusting bathrooms
- listening to my male teachers flaunt their "big, tough guy" persona
- not having enough writing or literature classes
- hearing my teachers talk more about their social life than the subject they teach
- wasting six hours and accomplishing nothing
- tedium
- watching my peers create loud, violent disturbances in class after class, and having teacher after teacher stand back and say helplessly "I don't know what to do with them."
- getting up at 6:21a.m.
- never getting any advice on my assignments and therefore, never becoming a better writer
- watching the teachers try even harder than students to invent excuses for us to not do any work
- counting the seconds and the minutes and the hours until I could go home and have my time truly be mine again

I am ready for college. I am ready to learn how to think and feel for myself again. --Kayla Sawyer --I am dead inside, and I have the educational system to thank (Shameless Digressions)

Kayla wrote this the evening that she finished her last day of classes as a high school student. She's on her way to Seton Hill University in the fall.

She contacted me the other day, saying that she heard SHU journalism majors used blogs, and she wanted to get sarted.

If you have a moment, I hope you'll visit her blog and let her know what you think about her writing. I know I'm looking forward to having her in class.

--Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric)

Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter.

An English teacher's heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it's not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren't about the real world; they're about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem's most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The surface-level meaning is something like this: "At evening, when the curfew bell rings, the cows and the plowman go home and leave me in the dark." Many students read passages like this, "decode" them into something they can understand, and then ask, "Why didn't he just say that?"

That's usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, "Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?" But in fact "Why didn't he just say that?" can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you're on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never "Because he had to rhyme" or "Because he couldn't do it any better.")--Jack Lynch --Close Reading (Getting an A on an English Paper)

It's really little wonder that college students want to talk about "the real world," since their high school English teachers often rewarded them for being able to apply a literary work to their own life. Thus, when reading a poem that invokes fear, students were encouraged to talk about times that they felt afraid. This is fine if it's presented as a way to get into the text, or if it is part of an informal response journal. But students who can't get beyond their vague impressions (perhaps because they didn't actually do the readings) can distract and stifle a classroom discussion.

Few things give me "that sinking feeling" more sharply than when, during a rickety class discussion, where a few students who haven't done the readings are still trying to fake me out by asking clarifying questions, and the students who have done the reading aren't ready to take a stand, someone makes a reference to a movie or TV show they just watched, and then hands suddenly shoot up all over the room, and I ask, "Can we relate Desperate Houswives to Arthur Miller?" and the hands go back down.

Between 4 and 4:45 p.m., the father gives you a great interview. His descriptions of his son are colorful, specific, and heartfelt. His overarching theme is the pride he feels for his son, and his stories all express this theme.

In particular the father relates: A) How his son was searching for a purpose in life and found it in the Army; B) How Army service instilled in his son the idea of importance of duty to nation; C) How when he had enlisted he, the father, had expressed some doubt but the son had cut him off: "Dad, it's what I want to do;" D) How his son was proud to be helping the Iraqi people establish democracy; E) How only a week ago his son had called him from Baghdad to say he had been assigned to a new mission to train Iraqi citizens to be soldiers, and how motivated he was by the mission; and F) that he and his son had had a heart-to-heart talk on the telephone and how the son had assured him that "he had no regrets" about signing up for Army service.

At 4:45 p.m., you, the reporter, are thinking to yourself: "Wow, I've got a great story here. Great color. Great quotes. A solid through-line. It's time to wrap it up and get back to write it on a tight deadline."

However, at that very moment, the son's mother makes her first appearance in the living room. She looks terrible, as though she hasn't slept for weeks. Her face is tear-stained, she's nervous and distracted. For the last few minutes of the interview, she keeps her eyes fixed on the floor as her husband speaks, but you notice she grimaces and shakes her head slightly when he speaks.

At this point I ask the students: "As a reporter, what do you do?" --Doug McGill --Covering the Iraq War: A Homefront Hypothetical (Local Man)

As adviser to The Setonian, I'm helping to develop a core of student-reporters who have the basics down, but who aren't always aware when they have the choice to take an angle that moves a story beyond the routine. There are only so many stories on parking, cafeteria food, and crowded dorms that we can cover, yet the mission of the student paper requires those student issues to be given attention. While our deadlines are never as rigid as the one described in the story, our student-reporters do sometimes feel the pressure to get the article done in order to get it over with. We don't yet have a culture in which a student will drop a less-important story in order to pursue breaking news that suddenly becomes more important.

I notice that elsewhere on his site, McGill questions Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View," and the teaching scenario described above is clearly intended to discourage covering local soldier deaths as patriotic events, and to encourage the examination of anti-war sentiment.

I can understand the value of reminding journalists to seek out alternative points of view, but in addition to this soldier scenario, I can imagine a similar story about an eco-activist who chained herself to a tree and was killed in the line of duty; key family members gushing their support of her actions, while one marginalized member suggests the family isn't united.

I tried to get this idea across in a final exam question featuring a conflict between cat owners and dog owners. Some students spent their time correcting the punctuation and grammar of a mock story, while others correctly pointed out that the bias in the story was a far bigger issue. That mock story was, based on a story that actually appeared in the Cavalier Daily, one of two competing student papers at the University of Virginia when I was an undergrad there. The Cavalier Daily reported that there were two protests, one pro-choice and one pro-life, at opposite sides of the downtown mall on the same day. If I recall correctly, the student's article contained three direct quotations and one paraphrase from pro-choice demonstrators, and represented the "anti-abortion" protestors by describing the signs they waved and the slogans they chanted. Yet the lead said that there were equal numbers of protestors at both events. Can you guess where the reporter's sympathies lie?

I'm planning to add a unit on editorial writing, so that students will have one outlet for expressing their political opinions, if they wish.

I usually tell my freshman comp students to stay away from emotional topics such as abortion or gay marriage, because students who choose such topics invariably end up quoting slogans rather than making academic arguments. In the context of an editorial, however, I can be more flexible.

I'm toying with the idea of putting students with wildly divergent political opinions on teams in which they have to co-author an editorial. People on opposite sides of the abortion issue might both agree to praise a particular government program or local charity, or they might both agree to criticize violence against clinics or the restriction of free speech in areas near clinics.

In looking back at those final "Practice of Journalism" exams, I'm surprised at the number of students who, when asked to define "objectivity," thought of something like "goal orientedness," obviously thinking of "objective" as "a goal to achieve," because they encounter "objectives" in the materials they use in starting their University Portfolio.

Working on ''Drama as Literature'' Syllabus (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm working on my goals statement for a 200-level “Major Writers and Genres” course. I'm still working it out -- the final version will be less chatty and more infused with academicspeak.

The primary research method I teach in a survey course is close reading – the extended examination of the particular words, style, and form of a particular literary work, gained by the sustained reading of a script. A secondary methodology is historical context – the identification and explication of contemporary cultural influences (including theatrical conventions of the period).

Students are asked to move quickly beyond plot summary and personal responses (which served them well in high school), and are asked to demonstrate critical thinking skills by participating in lively classroom discussions, by writing short expository and analytical exercises, and by writing two longer papers that support a non-obvious claim about the texts under scrutiny.

Literary research in English involves both primary sources (that is, literary works) and secondary sources (theoretical, biographical, and comparative explication, analysis, and evaluation). This method is introduced in a spring-semester EL150, “Intro to Literary Study,” and reiterated in a junior-level “Critical Theory” course. In a first-semester EL 250 course, which is typically packed with incoming freshmen, there will not be enough time for me to introduce the concept of academic scholarship, and the specific way it is practiced in English, to students who are at the same time taking the first semester of freshman composition.

Part of the historical research is a formal examination of theatrical conventions (sets and costumes, acting styles, audience expectations, critical response, etc.) that contributed to the reception of the work’s initial performance, and which continue to affect the reception of later performances. For instance, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was historically played as a comic villain, but modern productions use the same dialogue, but present him as a tragic figure. The historical method includes occasional reference to live or videotaped performances of the works, as well as published reviews, and such sources as memoirs of actors, directors, or other theatre professionals. But this course does not aim to examine a definitive, optimized, particular performance (something they are used to in the form of “Director’s Cut DVDs).

Students are often drawn to parallels between the author's biography and events in the story, a kind of mythic parallelism that drives the movie Shakespeare in Love, which shows the Bard incapable of any creativity that does not involve writing down (without any apparent revision) a thinly veiled version of what just happened to him last night. (I get lots of that when I ask students to write narrative essays.)

Where a dramatic work makes an ambiguous statement (such as in the matter of Hamlet’s madness), I aim to get students to identify ambiguity inherent in the text, and to rely upon textual evidence from elsewhere in the literary work to argue for a particular point. For example, when reading Ibsen’s A Doll House, students typically respond so negatively to Torvald’s patronizing and infantilizing of his wife Nora, that they prefer to see Torvald as a moustache-twirling oppressor, completely ignoring the textual evidence that argues he is a good provider and a good man, that she manipulates him into treating her like a child, and that both are equally victims of their prescribed gender roles.

Thus, a little-known 1913 play about anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernardhi, must be understood in the original context in pre-war Europe, but may also be re-read in 2005 in the context of American anti-Islamic tensions and anti-Christian and anti-American tensions in the Islamic world. The fourteenth-century “Everyman,” which uses the central merchant-class metaphor of an accounting book to teach a lesson about the inevitability of sin and death, must be understood in a certain historical context as a piece of didactic entertainment for a largely illiterate, wholly Catholic society. Yet the presence in the play of a brief aside, containing a stern warning directed at corrupt priests, resonates even more strongly today in light of the recent sexual scandals faced by the Church.

Hmm... thunder is booming outside my window, so I'm gonna cut this short and head home.

There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning. --Andrew O'Hagan --The Plot Flickers (Arts.Telegraph)

Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies.

A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news -- as so many older suburbanites unfortunately do -- you'd be afraid to go out of the house. --Bill Steigerwald --Real vs. media world (Tribune-Review)

HUNDREDS of BBC journalists and production staff in Manchester are to go out on strike today in protest at planned job cuts. --Nicola Dowling --BBC staff go on strike (Manchester Online)

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.... What they [Muslims] need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom." --Jeff Jacoby --Why Islam is disrespected (Boston.com)

Another take on the alleged Koran abuse story -- this one sympathetic to Newsweek without fingering the U.S. military.

The challenge is to create students who are lifelong learners rather than successful test takers. One of the phrases that Alan consistently uses in his presentations is "fearless learners," that we have to give our students the tools and the skills to find relevant information and use it well on their own. That we need to teach them to literally revel in the learning process and the collaborative, social construction of knowledge that it creates. That the teacher to student vertical model doesn't cut it any longer. I sincerely believe that is what the Read/Write Web can do, that it can provide the means for our students to create their own learning opportunities, that it can teach them how to negotiate meaning, how to find truth, and how to become a lifelong learner. I believe this because it's my own experience, and because I see more and more of it every day in this community of learners.

But here is the struggle, of course. Schools are not fearless. --Will Richardson --Fearless Learners, Fearful Schools (Weblogg-ed)

The retraction set off a firestorm in the blogosphere and on talk radio. The Bush Administration piled on too. White House press secretary Scott McClellan urged the magazine to help undo the damage to the U.S.'s image by pointing out ways in which "our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care." Newsweek wasn't the only media outlet feeling the heat. By inevitable extension, journalism in general was back under a shadow, its reputation already scuffed by a series of incidents, including the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times, the fall of Jack Kelley at USA Today, the dubious National Guard memos at CBS, Newsweek's use of a doctored photo of Martha Stewart on its cover, and CNN and TIME's 1998 retraction of the "Tailwind" story that claimed the U.S. had used nerve gas during a 1970 commando mission in Laos. --Richard Lacayo --When a Story Goes Terribly Wrong (Time)

This article follows up on Newsweek's retraction of a story alleging that a U.S. military official confirmed reports that guards flushed a prisoner's copy of the Koran down a toilet.

My Scrabble© Score is: 46. What is your score? Get it here.

--Pholph's Scrabble Generator (Solfire.com)

Cool fun, via MGK.

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005. --60 Second Story (Contagious Media)

Chess provided one of the safety valves that kept the lid on the cold war. But how did chess come to play this role: both symbol of the war and its antithesis? And how does chess illuminate the process by which the west triumphed over communism? --Daniel Johnson --Cold War Chess (Prospect)

Check it out, mate.

In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is "a multi-semiotic enterprise" prone to ambiguity and definitional drift.

Earlier this year, Davis gave a lecture to the mathematics department at USC titled "How Do We Know When a Problem Is Solved?" Often, he told the audience, we cannot tell, for "the formulation and solution of problems change throughout history, throughout our own lifetimes, and even through our rereadings of texts."

Part of the difficulty resides in the notion of what we mean by a solution, or as Davis put it: "What kind of answer will you accept?" -- Margaret Wertheim --Definitional Drift: Math Goes Postmodern (LA Times)

Interesting... the author saved "Dare we say it: Math is becoming postmodern" for the very end of her essay, but the headline writer gave it all away up front. Because I went into this article expecting to read about mathematics as a postmodern phenomenon, I was disappointed to find that claim only hinted at, not fully supported.

This isn't a criticism of the essay, but rather an observation of the different rhetorics of newspaper headlines (which are designed to grab the reader) and the classical essay (which is designed to build slowly to a conclusion that rewards the committed reader).

Extracurricular Blogging Roundup (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grades are in, and the semester is winding down. Things are fairly quiet on blogs.setonhill.edu, but that doesn't mean the site is dead.

Our admissions director, Mary Kay Cooper, continues to maintain her Training for the Ride of a Lifetime fitness blog, and she has also recently started the Seton Hill University Admissions blog.

The Setonian's news editor and online editor, Amanda Cochran, has posted her personal thoughts about her first day in a newswriting internship at the local paper.

Mike Rubino is one of SHU's most prolific bloggers, even though he has never taken a class with me. He frequently posts about the comedy improv troupe of which he's a member, The Cellar Dwellars. He just posted a tremendous account of what happened when the Cellar Dwellars were recognized by people in the crowd as they waited for the midnight showing of Star Wars.

Karissa Kilgore has recently posted about the astronomy, math, and philosophy courses she's taking this summer, as well as her struggles to get caffeine.

Mike Sichok waxes nostalgic over Nine Inch Nails, the 24th in a long-standing series of music reviews he has posted to his blog.

Oh, and if you'd like to see a photo of the top-level administrators of Seton Hill University waving flyswatters to the tune of "The Blue Danube Waltz," take a look at the photos I posted from the Seton Hill Unviersity faculty and staff end-of-year party.

Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

[..]

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?

[...]

Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you [Yoda] still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a f*cking give.--Anthony Lane --Space Case (New Yorker)

The asterisk is my addition.

There's plenty more ranting in this article.

I therefore formulate and offer to the world the following Principles for Quotations, two for quoters and two for readers, which, if universally followed, would make an immense improvement to the reliability of the information available on the world wide web.

Principle 1 (for readers)

Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.

Principle 2 (for readers)

Whenever you see a quotation given with a full source assume that it is probably being misused, unless you find good evidence that the quoter has read it in the source.

Principle 3 (for quoters)

Whenever you make a quotation, give the exact source.

Principle 4 (for quoters)

Only quote from works that you have read. --Martin Porter --Four Principles of Quotation (Martin Porter's Home Page)

Porter launched a detailed study of a quotation often attributed to Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

One of my students chose, as the title for her portfolio, a quotation that she identified as being from Shakespeare: "We know what we are, but know not what we may be." This is from Hamlet, and the speaker is Ophelia, who is at this point mad, and who will soon be found drowned in the pond. (I told the student I hoped she ended up better off in life.)

Thank goodness for Clueless, which has a brief exchange in which Cher corrects a snobby would-be intellectual who misattributes "To thine own self be true."

I also like Porter's close reading of four lines from Hamlet, "Doubt thou, the stars..."

At the grave yard Hamlet does not manifest any feelings towards his late father who according to the traditional interpretation, must have been buried there only a couple of months before that. Hamlet's behavior remains the same even when the grave-digger mentions king Hamlet. There appears an impression as if Hamlet had two different fathers: the one whose death he mourns, and the other one whom he does not remember. This is not strange because in the text, there are two Hamlets : the one who is about twenty, and the other one of thirty years of age.

According to the applied version of the Literary Theory, the only possible explanation is that Shakespeare created Hamlet as a menippeah containing several full-scale plots based on the same text. In every such work, there always exists an 'inner story' -- in this case, in a form of a drama reflecting the events in Elsinore, while its characters should correspond to 'real' persons with altered biographies.

An attentive reading reveals that the 'now living King' married Gertrude not a couple of months before the described events began but rather more than twenty years earlier, when prince Hamlet was a baby. This conclusion is supported with multiple facts scattered over the text of Hamlet. By employing them, several strictly logical conclusions are made:

King Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers; King Hamlet won Denmark by having killed his brother. (That is only too obvious. 'King Claudius' mentions the Norway as his brother. The Norway and the late king Fortinbras were brothers as well. Therefore, 'King Claudius' and Fortinbras were brothers. Further, 'King Claudius' assassinated king Hamlet who was his brother. Therefore, king Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers.) -- Well, is not that obvious, indeed? Did we really need four centuries to reveal that?

Prince Hamlet is king Hamlet's son only within the 'inner drama'; in 'reality' he is the last son to king Fortinbras. (Queen Gertrude delivered prince Hamlet in Elsinore on the very day of the battle. The castle was still in the possession of Fortinbras, therefore only his spouse could deliver Hamlet there.) (2)

Prince Hamlet and young Fortinbras were brothers as they were both the children to the same king Fortinbras?queen Gertrude couple. That explains why before his death prince Hamlet gives his vote for the throne in favor of prince Fortinbras.

In 'reality', King Hamlet was never poisoned by his brother. On the contrary, having killed his brother Fortinbras, he has been living with Gertrude for thirty years. We see him 'alive' for all five Acts, until his nephew Hamlet kills him. The act of poisoning took place only within the plot of the inner drama.

In 'reality', king Claudius does not exist at all; that is merely a character of the inner drama.

As Hamlet appears to be a menippeah with an 'inner story', there follows the necessity to perform certain steps:

Within the menippeah, there should exist a special character narrating the text. He must be the main object at whom Shakespeare's satire is aimed. The hidden intention of that character is the most important composition element of Hamlet.

Within the main plot of Shakespeare's work, it is necessary to define the identity of the 'proxy author' who has created the inner story. That might be the Narrator himself or some other person, but in any case that must be one of the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

It is imperative that the borders delimiting the 'main' body of Hamlet and the inner story should be defined. --Alfred Barkov --Hamlet: A Tragedy of Errors or the Fate of Shakespeare? (Wiliam Shakespeare Authorship -- Geocities)

Extremely interesting close reading. I'm going to spend some more time reading this more closely. The argument is remarkably consistent and thorough -- for instance, the author argues that a "real" plot takes place in prose, while a nested "performance" takes place in verse -- that The Mousetrap (the play that Hamlet asks the players to perform) actually encompasses many sequences that we have taken to be the text of Hamlet. Barkov suggests that the interruption of the play-within-the play is scripted, so that much of the action that follows the interruption is still part of the play. I'd love to have the chance to stage something like this, but the founding principles (such as the claim that Hamlet from the outermost drama is really the son of Fortinbras senior, who was killed by Hamlet senior in battle) don't stand up too well to even a casual application of Occam's razor.

I'm scheduled to teach "Drama as Literature" this fall, and Hamlet (and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) are probably going to be on the syllabus. Thus, yet another attempt to find meaning within meaning will make good reading. (See also Laura Bohannon's wonderful "Shakespeare in the Bush," in which an American anthropologist, convinced that Hamlet has a single, universal meaning, tests her theory by telling the story to the elders of an African tribe.)

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM'spositions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don't provide IBM'sor another'sconfidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
--Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary (IBM)

A good set of guidelines for the blogosphere in general.

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous. [...] A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it. --David G. Evans --How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers (Chronicle)

It is very tempting to teach everything the same way I taught it last time, shooting for polish and refinement rather than radical re-vision.

This year in my American Lit class, in response to the unusually high stress signals the students were giving off, I turned what had been on the syllabus as the final date for the term paper into the due date for a rough draft. I pulled an all-nighter marking those drafts and turned them back to students within a few days. In a class of about 25, only four students took advantage of the opportunity to revise.

It takes about a half hour for me to read and comment on a term paper, if I assume the paper is a draft and that the student will use my comments to revise. If, on the other hand, I am simply assigning a grade, I can easily sort the papers holistically -- Susie's paper is better than Billy's, which is not quite as good as Frankie's -- and then go back and assign grades based on whether each paper meets the assignment criteria.

A handful of others did benefit from the extension, in that they didn't bother to turn in the rough draft, and only turned in the final draft -- but that means I had to mark their papers closer to the end-of-term crunch. And some students didn't need to revise because they were happy with the As or Bs their draft earned them. But a significant chunk -- including most of the ones whose papers took the most time for me to evaluate -- decided they would rather live with their C or D.

Was the benefit to those four students worth the extra effort I put into the assignment? One one level, yes. On another level, I'm not so sure. I knew I couldn't force the students to take advantage of the opportunity, but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply writing a letter grade on the draft, and then simply let those students who were unhappy with their grade make an appointment with me to discuss it.

Dripping wet and deeply disturbed, the smartly-dressed man was discovered walking along a windswept road beside the sea. Over the next few days he steadfastly refused, or was unable, to answer the most simple questions about who he was or where he had come from.

It was only when someone in hospital had the bright idea of leaving him with a piece of paper and pencils that the first intriguing clue about the stranger's past emerged. He drew a detailed sketch of a grand piano. Excited, hospital staff showed him into a room with a piano and he began to skilfully perform meandering, melancholy airs. Several weeks later he has still not spoken a word, expressing himself only through his music. --Steven Morris --Do you know this man? Mystery of the silent, talented piano player who lives for his music  (Guardian)

A good example of a well-written news feature, which balances deft storytelling with the journalist's obligation to convey information without creating suspense by withholding crucial details. The first two paragraphs give the main facts of the entire story, including the conclusion. The rest of the article re-tells the same events in more detail.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1--but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation ?moderate,? versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative. --Joe Strupp --New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues (Editor & Publisher)

This article notes that the survey may have over-sampled upper management, with 43% of respondents being editors or news directors, many of them well-paid, and only 47% rank-and-file reporters.

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday. --David Morgan --Newsweek says erred in Koran desecration report (Reuters | MyWay)

A tiny item in Newsweek sparked huge international protests in Islamic countries, launching a huge wave of fresh anti-American sentiment, and leading to clashes in which protestors lost their lives.

The Reuters article cites former Guantanamo prisoners who reported abuse of the Koran, but Newsweek felt the accusations suddenly became newsworthy when a U.S. military official corroborated the claims. Later, that official backed down. Since the impetus to go with the story was based on the U.S. official's confirmation of the story, when that confirmation is withdrawn, Newsweek is left on shaky ground.

Rarely does a journalistic oversight have consequences that are this immediate, this dire, and this uncorrectable:

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

Are classic essays like Swift's still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay's legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they may.)

Blogging has replaced the real essay for most people under 30, just as the Internet has replaced the daily newspaper. Polls show more than 60 percent of online readers trust independent news sources like blogs over mainstream news sources. But while blogs provide immediacy, they also breed inaccuracy - from spelling and grammatical errors to errors of fact. An essay, despite the immediacy and passion with which it might have been written, has still been perused by an editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker before it saw print. (Even Swift had an editor.) A blog has been reviewed by no one, edited by no one - not even, in many cases, been proofread by the author.

Some bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan and Richard Scheer, are former newsmen with real journalistic credentials. Others, like Matt Drudge, are more like Stowe's Topsy - they just grew. Blogland isn't like the world of mainstream journalism, and bloggers are not usually serious essayists like Sullivan or Scheer. Any dot-commer can blog - a serious journalist with years of experience like, say, myself, or the teenager down the block spewing political rants during breaks from Grand Theft Auto. The problem in the blogosphere is that the kid and I will be received with equal credibility. --Victoria A. Brownworth --The Long Arm of the Blog (BaltimoreSun.com)

While Matt Drudge has often been lumped with bloggers, his site is a collection of links, with an occasional news/gossip exclusive. Drudge has shown what the democratization of journalism means for politics, but to compare him to an essayist is like comparing a ballet dancer to a polka dancer. Yes, both are dancers, but the set of skills involved are completely different. I can't tell you how many times that an outsider's attempt to analyze the blogosphere reminds me of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Citing the prevalence of online essay banks and the prevalence of bloggers in the same paragraph, and then implying that the two are somehow causally related is silly. Online essay banks were there long before the bloggers showed up.

For someone who strikes such a literate tone, I'm surprised Brownworth starts off with this example: "But blogs are pretenders to the throne of true essay writing. They mimic the essay much as Eliza Doolittle mimicked the Queen's English before Professor Higgins got his hands on her." Excuse me? While Eliza does show up at Higgins's house asking for lessons, she doesn't make any attempt to mimic the Queen's English beforehand. It's only Higgins who, intellectually smug and self-assured, gets it into his head that if only Eliza spoke more properly, he could pass her off as a duchess. "I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English."

If you consider what happens to Eliza after Higgins makes her too good for Covent Garden, and she gets tired of the ruse that lets her play the lady, I'm not so sure that Shaw's Pygmalion is the literary example I would choose if I were trying to make a point about the superiority of essays to blogs.

Brownworth dismisses all the things that blogs do better than essays, so naturally when she evaluates blogs on the same set of criteria that have been historically developed for essays, she's going to find bloggers come up short.

"Bloggers are more Web-cam style diarists than essayists," she says. Okay. And the average essayist, if placed in front of a web cam, would produce a pretty boring video diary -- if judged according to the criteria that are active in the webcam community.

As a writing teacher, I struggle to get students to plan ahead, to condense, to revise. So I can identify with Brownworth's woes. But an experienced diaryblogger has a certain set of skills that a non-writer has never developed.

Brownworth, whose essay invokes Orwell to attack the achievements of bloggers, uses a bit of Orwellian rhetoric herself. Brownworth's final warning, " Blogland is a sprawl, fast encroaching on the fragile landscape of the finely wrought essay," invokes the "urban sprawl" that encroaches on the "landscape" of pristine nature.

This presumes that the "finely wrought essay" is natural, while it is in fact the result of hundreds of years of conventions, aesthetic rules and personal judgments.

The essay is just as artificially constructed as the weblog. Yes, the essay has been around for hundreds of years, but its existence depends upon the existence of an intellectual aristocracy of educated men and women with the necessary leisure time to write back and forth to each other about subjects that they deem important, using rhetorical techniques and organizational patterns that they themselves deem effective.

The great Greek orators voiced similar complaints about a vulgar form of communication that they said killed spontaneity, and would permit anyone with a smattering of technical skill to masquerade as a great communicator.

The bastard art the Greek orators derided was called "writing".

Link via metafilter.

For those of you who don't know what Mono is... let me explain. It is known to most ignorant people as "The Kissing Disease." This, of course, makes anyone who has it appear to be a whore or a gameshow host. But, this isn't a proper representation of how the disease is actually spread. I certainly didn't get it through kissing (I more than likely caught it from my roommate Jon, or from just general overwork). But the disease is actually spread through saliva and mucus. So you could really call it the "Blowing Your Nose Into Someone's Mouth/Licking Someone's Eye/Sticking Your Tongue In Someone's Ear/Sneezing on Someone Else' Tongue/Pouring a Cup of Your Spit into Someone's Coffee" Disease. That's a little more fitting. --Mike Rubino --Thank You Epstein-Barr (Tranquility Lost)

An SHU student, who I've never actually had in a class, offers this as his end-of-term excuse. (Tongue in cheek, of course.)

The departure of Griego Erwin, who wrote three columns a week, continues the run of recent embarrassments for newspapers, many of which have cost writers their jobs.

Last week, USA Today Pentagon correspondent Tom Squitieri resigned under pressure after lifting quotes from another newspaper and using other quotes without attribution.

That followed on the heels of the resignation of veteran Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Al Levine, who pilfered information from two Florida newspapers without crediting them.

Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater was dismissed last month when editors at the newspaper could not verify information in an article he wrote about fraternity hazing at Cal State Chico.

The recent headliner in the string of news scandals was bestselling author, sports columnist and TV personality Mitch Albom, who was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for describing a scene in the stands at an NCAA basketball tournament game before the game had been played.

With polls showing journalists already held in low esteem, the run of bad news has alarmed many in the business. --James Rainey --Newspaper Columnist Resigns After Inquiry (Yahoo! News (will expire))